One of the biggest problems in the Lahaina wildfire disaster was the inability to communicate that cut the whole west side of Maui off from the rest of the island and the rest of the world after the recent wildfire disaster. A disaster relief team from the Mainland brought in STARLINK units which saved the day for many. How does it work?
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Traditional satellite internet has two major problems
The first is latency
The satellite must be in Geosynchronous orbit which is very high up. Even though radio moves at the speed of light that’s 640ms of latency or more.
That’s a delay of half a second when you click on something which for surfing the web is annoying, for gaming or remote work is basically unusable.
The second is bandwidth
The satellites only have so much bandwidth and its shared by all the subscribers. Internet satellites have upwards of 25 times more users than they were designed to handle… and Even if you use a different ISP they all share the same satellites so you have the same problem. So the download speeds you get are appalling by cable standards.
There’s two ways around this
1 run a cable
Contrary to popular belief the internet and phones don’t run on satellites unless they absolutely have to. Undersea fiber optic cables do most of the long distance heavy lifting.
2 Launch smaller satellites that are closer to the Earth.
This is what Starlink does. They deliver large numbers of smaller low-orbit satellites that communicate with each other.
This allows for faster internet with lower latency than traditional satellites.
Since you don’t need cables you can access the internet almost anywhere on earth and as they launch more satellites the service gets better and better.
Running a cable is still preferred, but the difference between them is shrinking.
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